Angry customers, negative media coverage, frustrated employees, untold revenue lost, lingering anger from customers: that’s the status for Delta Airlines this week. Of course this is not news to anyone; unless you have been living under a rock you have heard the numerous news reports detailing the Delta computer disaster. Whether caused by a minor power outage at Delta headquarters or an internal computer hiccup, the airline was forced to cancel over 500 flights causing gridlock across America’s airports at the height of vacation season. You may not be running an international transportation corporation, but imagine what would happen to your clients if you had an unexpected IT failure. Think something like this can’t happen to you? Think again. The problem that Delta airlines faced was not the power outage at their headquarters; it was an inadequate IT Disaster Recovery Plan. As a business owner you don’t want to be caught off guard in the middle of an IT nightmare. An IT Disaster Recovery Plan may sound like a great idea, but you might not even know what one looks like, let alone know where to start. Here at Capstone Works we are your IT partner and are ready to put together a comprehensive IT Disaster Recovery Plan. The goal of any good plan is fivefold, it should:

Most small business owners believe cyberattacks are the concern of large corporations, however nothing could be further from the truth. According to Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 71% of cyberattacks occur at businesses with less than 100 employees. [1]

Unfortunately, many “SMBs suffer from 'It can't happen to us' syndrome,” notes Robert Siciliano, security expert for McAfee. “They also typically don't have the resources to secure their networks to the degree a large enterprise would. But the information on their networks – and access to their bank accounts – still makes them a big target.” Even though it turns out SMB’s have a larger target on their backs than they realize, two thirds of SMBs surveyed by Symantec say they're not concerned about cyber threats; and more than 80 percent have no formal cyber security plan.

The FBI has issued alerts to all businesses about the spread of BEC scams. One of the fastest growing hazards facing businesses today is the growth of Business Email Compromise or BEC scams. According to the FBI, these scams have grown by more than 270% since the beginning of last year. At their last reporting, more than 7,000 businesses have lost more than $1.2 billion in the last 2 years. At Capstone Works we help you to manage your IT risks. We are at the forefront of IT risk management; monitoring, assessing and evaluating threats to your network no matter where they may come from. You can be confident knowing that Capstone Works is in your corner. While these scams may, at first, seem less impressive than thefts perpetrated by sophisticated malware targeting banks and other large institutions; a BEC attack is, in reality, more vicious. They are more versatile and can avoid the basic security steps taken by businesses and individuals. Instead of simply targeting your machines, a BEC scam targets your people! Criminals are convincing their victims to hand company money right over to them, and they have been very successful in doing so. According to the FBI, “The scam has been reported in all 50 states and in 79 countries. Fraudulent transfers have been reported going to 72 countries; however, the majority of the transfers are going to Asian banks located within China and Hong Kong.

Your identity has quite a lot of value, especially in the wrong hands. Security firm ZoneAlarm put together some numbers in 2011 concerning identity fraud, and it even shocked us. Let's talk about a few of these statistics and what it means.

Email is (and has been) a prime method of communication for businesses of all sizes. With email comes a whole slew of issues that are essentially synonymous with the technology; spam, information overload, phishing, and information privacy. Even Central Texas small businesses that only do business locally are at risk of these issues. Personal email accounts are equally at risk. Employing proper precautions and practices whenever communicating via email is very important to prevent the risk of security compromises, monetary loss, and even legality issues.

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Capstone Works, Inc. is proud to announce the launch of our new website at http://www.capstoneworks.com. The goal of the new website is to make it easier for our existing clients to submit and manage support requests, and provide more information about our ser...